Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball on the pro side and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West. Below is my assessment of the AL Central, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.

Chicago White Sox

Jonathan Stiever’s promotion was instructive because we got to see his velocity coming off of the forearm soreness that ended his spring. He sat 91-94, which is a little below his peak 2019 breakout when he would touch 6’s and 7’s. His changeup looked good, though, and it was a stabilizing force during a jittery first start. He’ll need to locate his slider more consistently for it to be effective, and the same goes for his heater if it’s going to live around 93. Stiever also incorporated his secondary stuff more often in his second outing — that’s probably the long-term strategy if this is where his fastball velocity is going to live.

You’re probably aware that Garrett Crochet made his major league debut over the weekend, becoming the first 2020 draftee to reach the majors and the first since Mike Leake to skip the minors entirely. He made just one pre-draft start this spring sandwiched between a February injury and March’s shutdown, so he was barely seen by teams this year, if at all, which is why some clubs were hesitant to draft him early in the first round. I’ve updated The Board to include his pitch data now that I have it, but neither his Future Value nor ranking has changed yet (45 FV is a late-inning reliever). He currently has the hardest fastball in baseball, and Crochet joins Zack Burdi and Codi Heuer as White Sox rookie relievers who have among the top 20 fastest heaters in the game. He’s yet another weapon in a bullpen that I consider dangerous enough to carry the Pale Hose deep into October. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting old is for the birds. Since turning 37 on February 20, as the 2020 season has gone through its starts and stops, Justin Verlander has dealt with triceps soreness, a groin strain that required surgery and, after throwing six strong innings in his Opening Day start on July 24, a forearm strain. On Saturday, he announced that he would need Tommy John surgery, not only ruling out what the Astros hoped would be a comeback for this postseason, but almost certainly sidelining him for all of 2021, sending him into free agency with just one outing over a two-year span, and preventing him from attaining upper-tier spots in the all-time rankings of some significant categories.

Verlander broke the news himself via Instagram, saying in a video that he felt something in his elbow during Wednesday’s simulated game, which led to an MRI. Here’s the written statement from that post:

After consulting with several of the best doctors, it has become clear that I need Tommy John surgery. I was hopeful that I would be able to return to competition in 2020, however, during my simulated game unfortunately the injury worsened. Obviously I’m extremely disappointed, but I will not let this slow down my aspirations for my career. I will approach this rehab the only way I know, attack and don’t look back. I’m confident that with a proper rehabilitation program and my unwavering commitment that this surgery will ultimately lengthen my career as opposed to shorten it. I can’t thank my teammates, coaches, the front office and my fans enough for the support they have given me so far in this process. I’m eager to get through this recovery and back on the field to continue to do what I love.

This isn’t entirely a shock, but it is a bummer. In the wake of his forearm strain, some outlets had reported that Verlander would be out for the season, though the pitcher and the team didn’t rule out a comeback. He resumed throwing of flat ground in mid-August, off a mound in the first week of September, and had gone as high as 55-60 pitches in bullpen sessions before Wednesday, when he threw a total of 75 pitches, though only 24 game during his simulated game. The Astros hoped that he could make one more simulated start on Monday and then one competitive start before the postseason, but Verlander’s ulnar collateral ligament wasn’t buying it. Read the rest of this entry »

For pitchers on the fringes of the major leagues, 2020 has been a strange year. The dense schedule means teams are cycling through bullpen pieces faster than ever in an attempt to keep fresh arms available. There are no minor league games for the players who aren’t on the active roster, merely alternate sites and live batting practice. It’s a strange, peripheral experience.

For Cardinals pitchers on the fringes of the major leagues, it’s been stranger still, because their schedule has been even more compressed. A string of double headers means pitchers who would normally be relief arms are making spot starts, which calls for more relievers to back them up. Twenty-one players have made relief appearances for St. Louis this year, all the way from Roel Ramirez up to Giovanny Gallegos.

Shuffling relievers means shuffling relief roles. That’s how Ryan Helsley, a hard-throwing righty who split time between Triple-A Memphis and St. Louis last year, ended up taking the mound for the Cardinals with a chance to record his first career save on Friday evening. Gallegos, the team’s nominal closer, is on the Injured List. Génesis Cabrera, the reliever who has thrown the most innings for them this year, had already pitched in the game. Alex Reyes, the most dynamic arm in the ‘pen, was gassed; he’d thrown 39 pitches already. Hence Helsley, who needed only two outs against the woeful Pirates to add “big league closer” to his resume. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, Fernando Tatis Jr. had what looked to be an insurmountable National League WAR-lead. Here’s what our NL position player leaderboard looked like before action got underway on Monday, September 7:

With just three weeks left to go in the regular season, Tatis had a one-win lead. Two weeks later, that lead is gone:

What Freddie Freeman has accomplished in the last two weeks has been incredible:

Freeman’s last two weeks would rank 25th for the entire season. If you are wondering if he’s ever done anything like this before, the answer is yes; he’s done it twice:

Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s column leads with three perspectives on minor-league contraction, which is slated to occur once the current CBA expires at the end of this month. At least 40 teams are expected to lose affiliated status when that happens, with entire regions of the country finding themselves devoid of professional baseball. A wide-ranging look at the business side of the proposed contraction was provided here at FanGraphs, courtesy of SABR CEO Scott Bush, earlier in the week.

Today we’ll hear from a pair of broadcasters, each of whom paid his dues down on the farm before reaching the big leagues, and from an MLB general manager.

Joe Block, Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster:

“It’s a two-way street, because I can see where the economics makes sense for Major League Baseball. They’re trying to streamline the minor leagues, and I can see the rationale for that. There maybe are too many teams; there are so many organizational players, as opposed to actual prospects. Realigning some of the leagues makes sense for easier travel. From a business standpoint, those things make a lot of sense to me.

“At the same time, I worked in Billings and in Great Falls. Those were two of the greatest experiences of my life, and not just my baseball life. I was living in Montana during the summers. I know how important [baseball] is to folks that live there. The winters are brutal, so having a ball game to watch, a family event… the team is a fabric of the communities in those particular towns.”

Dave Raymond, Texas Rangers brodcaster

“Contraction will be very tough on young broadcasters. Minor League Baseball is the training ground. [Play-by-play] takes time to figure out, to become comfortable with your voice, how to present the game every night. how you control that action. There are executives at the Major League level who, when I’ve applied for jobs, told me, ‘I’ve got to see at least a minimum of 500 games in the minor leagues before we would really even consider a guy.’ It might be 1,000 games.

“Now we’ll be dealing with a smaller pool of potential broadcasters. The guy who would have had a job for a team that gets contracted might have been the next Vin Scully. If he never gets the opportunity, we’ll never know. Plus, even if it doesn’t materialize in the ultimate — a big-league play-by-play job — for so many people, simply getting to call games is a realization of a dream. It would be disappointing for young guys, and gals, to miss out on that opportunity if there is indeed contraction. Read the rest of this entry »

There are myriad reasons why the Houston Astros have spent 2020 hovering around the .500 mark, a distinct decline from last season’s 107-win record. One of those reasons is a down season from second baseman Jose Altuve, who has been a key part of the team’s core over the last decade. With .216/.281/.307 line, Altuve is having his worst season as a major leaguer and at age-30, this kind of performance decline is more concerning than it would be if it were just a mid-20s blip. Further complicating matters, at least from a storyline perspective, is the fact that Altuve was a member of the Astros squad that played fast and loose with the league’s policies on electronic sign-stealing. Any Astro from that era who later underperforms relative to expectations is going to be put under the microscope, and with Altuve the big underachiever, his performance is likely to bear a fair amount of scrutiny.

So, what’s going on? There are a few aspects of Altuve’s season that could rightly be passed off as chance-related, but others might serve as signals of decline in the second baseman’s skills. When trying to explain poor performance, one obvious place to look is to see whether pitchers are taking a new, more effective approach to a batter. Pitchers have been throwing Altuve more sliders than ever before, a 28% rate that’s nearly double what it was four or five years ago. He’s struggled facing the pitch this year, hitting .226 with no extra-base hits; with a .283/.312/.387 line against sliders over the course of his career, it’s the pitch he’s had the most trouble with. But those numbers are not disastrous in themselves. Before now, Altuve’s been really good at hitting just about everything.

Last month, my colleague Alex Chamberlain discussed Altuve’s launch angle tightness and how he’d been increasingly inconsistent in 2019, an inconsistency that persisted into the first few weeks of the 2020 season. Altuve’s standard deviation of launch angle of 32.7 degrees in 2020 would have ranked him dead-last in baseball last year. Inconsistency from a struggling player, one who used to be among the more consistent in baseball, isn’t what you want to see. And this is important because a large part of Altuve’s missing performance is BABIP-related and a tightly clustered launch angle has a relationship with that number. Altuve had a career .340 BABIP entering 2019, put up a .303 last year, and is standing at .254 this year. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres added Mike Clevinger to their starting rotation, they were bolstering what was already a team strength. San Diego’s rotation had cumulatively put up the fourth-best FIP in baseball through the end of August, and that mark has improved from 3.92 to 3.64 in just a few weeks’ time. Their rotation is now the second-best in baseball by FIP and fourth-best by ERA. Dinelson Lamet has led the way with his 2.12 ERA and 2.70 FIP, but their second-best starter might not be who you expect. It’s not last year’s phenom Chris Paddack (4.74 ERA/4.66 FIP) nor is it the finally healthy Garrett Richards (4.27/4.28). It is Zach Davies and his 2.69 ERA and 3.68 FIP.

Acquired from the Brewers in November in the same trade that netted them Trent Grisham, a budding superstar in his own right, Davies has been a surprising source of quality innings for the Padres. A command artist armed with a diving changeup and an 88-mph sinker, he put together a solid-if-unspectacular career in Milwaukee over 600 innings. Despite well-below-average fastball velocity, he’s managed to succeed with a pitch-to-contact mentality by avoiding hard contact.

In late March, Davies discussed his pitch mix in an interview with David Laurila, titled, “Zach Davies Plans to Rely Less on Changeups.” Here’s how he explained it:

“I was getting guys out in any way possible. Going into last year, I was coming off injuries [rotator cuff inflammation and lower back tightness] and wasn’t guaranteed a starting spot. I wasn’t able to go into spring training and work on pitches, and the best way for me to get outs was fastball-changeup. That’s why the numbers were skewed. This year there will be a lot more of a mix.”

Davies threw his changeup 31.3% of the time last year, more than twice as often as he had in 2018 and good for the highest rate of his career. After struggling with his health the year before, he lost the feel for his curveball last year and leaned on his fastball-changeup combo to great effect. He posted the lowest ERA of his career, even though it was a little more than a full run lower than his FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Gregory Polanco had Greg Holland in a bind. Leading off the ninth inning in a one-run game, he worked the count to 3-1. Holland isn’t exactly a control artist, and none of his first four pitches had been in the zone — Polanco could sit dead red and only engage with a pitch he could pummel. He got it — middle-middle no less — and took a mighty cut:

Whoops! That wasn’t what Polanco was aiming for, and Holland got away with one. He finished Polanco off with a 3-2 slider below the zone, and the Pirates went down in order.

Everyone misses a cookie once in a while. Polanco, however, is making a habit of it this year. Here he is against Carlos Carrasco (see what I did there?) in August:

All told, Polanco has taken a swing at 26 pitches in the white hot center of the strike zone this year. He’s come up empty on 12 of them. That’s the worst rate in the majors this year — unsurprisingly — and the second-worst whiff rate on middle-middle pitches since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008. Among batters who took at least 25 cuts at down-the-middle pitches, only Kyle Parker (in 2015) did worse. You haven’t heard of Kyle Parker, because, well, he swung and missed at too many pitches.

While you might be surprised by that particular Polanco fact, it’s no secret that he’s having a down year. He’s batting .135/.190/.294 and striking out in more than 40% of his at-bats. Have a synonym for futile? It probably applies to Polanco’s 2020. It would almost be a surprise if he weren’t having a tough time with easy pitches, though maybe not to this extent. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Clint Frazier is no longer the future of the Yankees outfield — or, as it has sometimes seemed over the past few years, of somebody else’s — he’s the present. The 26-year-old righty-swinging redhead, who began the season toiling at the Yankees’ alternate training site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, homered for the second straight night on Wednesday, helping the Yankees overtake the Blue Jays for second place in the AL East. During a season in which Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have played a combined total of 35 games due to injuries, in which age has finally caught up to Brett Gardner, and in which the 2019 magic has worn off of Mike Tauchman, Frazier has shown that both his lightning-quick bat and much-maligned glove are ready for prime time.

On Tuesday and Wednesday night in the Bronx while facing the Blue Jays — who came to town half a game ahead of the Yankees in the AL East standings — the Yankees erupted for 33 runs, winning by lopsided scores of 20-6 and 13-2 while hitting at least six homers in back-to-back games for the first time in franchise history; they added another 10 runs and six homers on Thursday night. While Stanton and Judge went hitless in their respective returns from injuries, and AL wRC+ leader (!) DJ LeMahieu and major-league home run leader (!) Luke Voit produced their share of fireworks on both nights, Frazier was right in the middle of the action, collecting two hits, two walks, and a homer in each game. Using MLB.com’s fantastic new Film Room feature, we can play the hits from those two nights in one clip:

Read the rest of this entry »

After a deal with Steve Cohen to purchase the New York Mets was nixed last year due to issues of continued team control, the Wilpons looked for other suitors only to end up back with the hedge fund billionaire. According to Sportico, the deal values the Mets at $2.42 billion. Cohen will assume 95% ownership of the team, increasing his stake from 8%; the Wilpon family will retain control of the remaining 5%. The transaction will not include the Mets’ regional sports network SNY, a cash cow currently controlled by the Wilpons’ Sterling Equity with a 65% share.

The sale is the largest in MLB history, and given the franchise’s $391 million value at the time of the Wilpons’ purchase in 2002, it’s also the most profitable in terms of total dollar amount. Here are MLB franchise purchase price valuations since 1988 in chronological order:

And here’s profitability compared to the previous valuation:

In terms of annual profits based on the valuation of the franchise when it was bought and sold, the Mets’ deal is a little closer to the middle at around 9%. There’s an argument that being only a little bit above average isn’t great, though being above-average on a debt-laden team in the middle of a pandemic looks to be a pretty positive outcome. Here’s where the Mets’ sale stacks up in terms of its annual increase in value after inflation:

Before we get to Cohen, let’s take a look back at the Wilpons and how we got here.

From Initial Investment to Full Control

Fred Wilpon reportedly originally bought 5% of the Mets in 1980 when Doubleday & Co. purchased the team for $21.1 million. Six years later, Nelson Doubleday and Wilpon joined forces to purchase the club at a value of around $80 million. It wasn’t until 16 years after that that Wilpon and his family gained full control of the club, though the purchase was not without controversy. The sale price valuing the club at $391 million was set by an appraiser and initially contested by Doubleday. He argued against the price due to a number of factors ranging from:

Wilpon being “in cahoots” with baseball to force him to accept less-than-market value for his 50 percent of the Mets to baseball “manufacturing phantom operating losses” as part of its labor strategy.

Doubleday relented on his claims after the Wilpons agreed to quadruple the money owed at the time of sale from $28 million to $100 million. In the end, the Wilpons paid just $135 million to purchase the other half of the club from Doubleday due to team debt that was subtracted from the purchase. For about $1 million in 1980, $40 million in 1986, and $135 million in 2002, the Wilpon family gained full control of the Mets. Read the rest of this entry »